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About When God Talks Back

A bold approach to understanding the American evangelical experience from an anthropological and psychological perspective by one of the country’s most prominent anthropologists.

Through a series of intimate, illuminating interviews with various members of the Vineyard, an evangelical church with hundreds of congregations across the country, Tanya Luhrmann leaps into the heart of evangelical faith. Combined with scientific research that studies the effect that intensely practiced prayer can have on the mind, When God Talks Back examines how normal, sensible people—from college students to accountants to housewives, all functioning perfectly well within our society—can attest to having the signs and wonders of the supernatural become as quotidian and as ordinary as laundry. Astute, sensitive, and extraordinarily measured in its approach to the interface between science and religion, Luhrmann’s book is sure to generate as much conversation as it will praise.

About When God Talks Back

How does God become and remain real for modern evangelicals? How are rational, sensible people of faith able to experience the presence of a powerful yet invisible being and sustain that belief in an environment of overwhelming skepticism? T. M. Luhrmann, an anthropologist trained in psychology and the acclaimed author of Of Two Minds, explores the extraordinary process that leads some believers to a place where God is profoundly real and his voice can be heard amid the clutter of everyday thoughts. While attending services and various small group meetings at her local branch of the Vineyard, an evangelical church with hundreds of congregations across the country, Luhrmann sought to understand how some members were able to communicate with God, not just through one-sided prayers but with discernable feedback. Some saw visions, while others claimed to hear the voice of God himself. For these congregants and many other Christians, God was intensely alive. After holding a series of honest, personal interviews with Vineyard members who claimed to have had isolated or ongoing supernatural experiences with God, Luhrmann hypothesized that the practice of prayer could train a person to hear God’s voice—to use one’s mind differently and focus on God’s voice until it became clear. A subsequent experiment conducted between people who were and weren’t practiced in prayer further illuminated her conclusion. For those who have trained themselves to concentrate on their inner experiences, God is experienced in the brain as an actual social relationship: his voice was identified, and that identification was trusted and regarded as real and interactive. Astute, deeply intelligent, and sensitive, When God Talks Back is a remarkable approach to the intersection of religion, psychology, and science, and the effect it has on the daily practices of the faithful.

About T.M. Luhrmann

Tanya Luhrmann is a psychological anthropologist and a professor in the Department of Anthropology at Stanford University. She received her education from Harvard and Cambridge universities, and was elected as a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences… More about T.M. Luhrmann

About T.M. Luhrmann

Tanya Luhrmann is a psychological anthropologist and a professor in the Department of Anthropology at Stanford University. She received her education from Harvard and Cambridge universities, and was elected as a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences… More about T.M. Luhrmann

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Praise

Praise for T. M. Luhrmann’s When God Talks Back:

“The most insightful study of evangelical religion in many years. . . . When God Talks Back is remarkable for combining creative psychological analysis with a commitment to understanding evangelicals not merely as scholarly specimens, but on their own terms.” —The New York Times Book Review

“Tanya Luhrmann is a very sensitive participant-observer and a beautiful writer, with a deep background in her subject, and her exploration of evangelical religion in America is at once empathetic and objective, as all good anthropology must be. When God Talks Back is one of the most provocative and enlightening books I have read this year.” —Oliver Sacks

“Luhrmann is a well-qualified guide: an anthropologist specializing in esoteric faiths. . . . She has addressed a subject that most other people would never touch.” —The New Yorker

“Ambitious, even audacious. . . . We can thank Luhrmann for describing evangelicalism as it has always been: a potent means for awakening a personal sense of the reality, power and mercy of God. . . . An industrious undertaking [that] produced fascinating results.” —San Francisco Chronicle

“[When God Talks Back] will reshape the study of American spirituality for years to come. . . . This book is here to stay, and every scholar, church leader, and pundit who cares about American evangelical culture is the better for it.” —Books and Culture

“Resistant to the scornful stereotypes of the New Atheists, evangelicals who shared their spiritual lives with [Luhrmann] come across as complex men and women whose faith reflects intense emotional and mental commitment. . . . In this sympathetic yet probing analysis, the evangelical spiritual dialogue with the deity emerges as the consequence of a surprisingly self-conscious strategy for finding meaning in a whirlwind of postmodern uncertainty. Much here for curious skeptics to ponder.” —Booklist (starred review)

“Yet again T. M. Luhrmann investigates a puzzling phenomenon and illuminates it brilliantly. Whether you are a determined rationalist or a dedicated evangelical, you’ll be enlightened by Luhrmann’s synthesis—a worthy successor to William James’s The Varieties of Religious Experience.”—Howard Gardner, Hobbs Professor of Cognition and Education, Harvard University

“T. M. Luhrmann’s gift is the ability to observe and report with the eyes of both an anthropologist and a novelist. This alchemy is so evident as she makes this most extraordinary narrative exploration of faith and its manifestations in everyday American life. A lovely book and a wonderful read.” —Abraham Verghese, author of Cutting for Stone

“Anthropology—ready enough to discourse about religion—has never managed a thick description of prayer. This is the ground that T. M. Luhrmann breaks with a deeply engrossing, first-ever, thick anthropological description of prayer in two American evangelical congregations. A remarkable intellectual venture. —Jack Miles, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of God: A Biography

“What if nonbelievers could understand how people come to experience God? What if believers could come to understand just how difficult the process of coming to experience God is for all of us, here at the end of modernity? When God Talks Back is a chance for our divided nation to stop talking past each other about our national preoccupation: God.” —Ken Wilson, senior pastor of Vineyard Church of Ann Arbor and author of Mystically Wired: Exploring New Realms in Prayer“So readable, so informing, so scholarly, and yet so winsome. . . . This is religion writing at its best—a masterful examination that is a candid, humble, clear-eyed, and affirming record of what faith looks like and how it operates.”—Phyllis Tickle, author of The Great Emergence and founding editor of Publishers Weekly’s Religion Department

“Rarely have I encountered a book that succeeds so admirably in exploring the interior lives of America’s evangelicals. What makes this book so remarkable is not only the author’s exhaustive and empathetic fieldwork but that her conclusions emerge from a deep understanding of the history of evangelicalism.” —Randall Balmer, author of The Making of Evangelicalism

“How can one live a life at once wholly modern and fully engaged with the supernatural realm? Many books aim to explain how American evangelicals pull this off, but this is the one that will actually change the way you think about religion going forward. Writing elegantly and sympathetically about evangelical lives while at the same time developing a profound theory of the learning processes by which human beings come to inhabit religious worlds, Lurhmann has produced the book all of us—believers and nonbelievers alike—need to put our debates about religion and contemporary society on a truly productive footing. People will be learning from When God Talks Back for a very long time to come.” —Joel Robbins, Professor of Anthropology, University of California, San Diego

“A compelling account of how evangelical Christians come to experience God as intimately and lovingly present in their lives. Drawing on two years of field work, supplemented by extensive knowledge of evangelical literature and innovative scientific field experiments, Luhrmann’s demonstration of the role of both training and individual abilities in the shaping of religious experience breaks important new ground in the cognitive science of religion.” —Ann Taves, author of Religious Experience Reconsidered

“[Luhrmann] has entered into the world of her subjects with extraordinary empathy and impressive humility. . . . I find Luhrmann’s description of the Evangelical experience highly plausible as well as an admirable intellectual achievement.” —Peter L. Berger, First Things Magazine

Author Q&A

Q: You are an anthropologist at Stanford and your last book, Of Two Minds, examined the world of psychiatry. What led you to study the evangelical relationship with God?

A: Both psychiatrists and Christians are making sense of the pain in the human condition. Both of them come up with abstract human concepts to interpret something they know to be more complicated than they can explain in words, and yet those words then shape the way they see and experience their world. In my book on psychiatry, I set out to understand how talking about emotions transformed them. Understanding the faith experience seemed like the next logical step.

Q: Were the people of the Vineyard Christian Fellowship hesitant to have an anthropologist attending their services and meetings? Did it take time for them to open up to you? How did they react to the conclusions that you have drawn?

A: The people at the churches where I spent time were remarkably gracious and open. I think they were sometimes a little startled by the questions I asked and the things I said, but that comes with having an anthropologist around. They really liked my conclusion that prayer was a skill, and that some people had more aptitude for the skill than others, because not everyone at a church like this really does feel that God speaks to them—and that makes them feel badly, as if they aren’t really worthy of being loved by God, even if they know theologically that that is silly. So my research observation that some people had more of a proclivity for these experiences than others was actually comforting to them.

Q: Science and religion are often seen to be at odds with each other, yet you use scientific methods to shed light on religious experiences and you do it with great empathy. Was it difficult to strike this balance?

A: Anthropologists are trained both to participate; and to in effect watch themselves participate. I threw myself into the prayer experience, and I also observed what happened to me as I prayed. That experience also gave me a healthy measure of respect for how complicated the world is, and how little we understand. And really, that respect for the limitations of our knowledge is at the heart of both faith and science.

Q: What was the biggest surprise to you in your research?

A: I was startled by how real God could be for people—that some people were really able to experience God as an intimate friend, and sometimes even feel God’s touch or hear God’s voice. When people say that they heard God speak, it’s not just something they are saying to show how religious they are. They really experience themselves as interacting. And I was blown away to realize that they learn to experience God as real by talking to God about the little things—like what shampoo to buy.

Q: You describe a “magically real” God as a very modern phenomenon. When in our history did this personal experience with God develop?

A: The major shift in American spirituality began in the 1960s, with the great social upheaval of the time. People wanted a direct, immediate experience of God. It is a period when people became acutely aware of other faiths, and when people were experimenting with experience in many ways. Most people don’t realize that the Christianity many of them take to be right wing actually was born among the hippie Christians and was one of the most left-wing social revolutions our country has ever known.

Q: What role does doubt play in this kind of faith? And how does a vivid relationship with God help believers to deal with this doubt?

A: You can’t understand Christianity unless you understand that all Christians struggle with doubt at some point in their lives, even if it is just the doubt that the promise of joy they hear from the pulpit actually is meant for them. But doubt is different in this kind of modern, scientific, pluralistic society. Even the most sheltered Christian knows that there are smart, sensible people who do not think that God is real. The vivid, intimate God of this kind of church helps people to protect their faith against their own doubt because it emphasizes experiencing God rather than believing in God, and because the practices people use to develop that experience actually really do make God feel more real.

Q: You describe how prayer literally changes the brain, and allows people to experience God’s voice as a recognizable relationship. How did you test for this?

A: I ran an experiment in which I assigned Christians randomly into a prayer condition and into lectures on the Gospels. I found that after a month of prayer practice, people reported more vivid mental imagery than those in the lectures condition. They used mental imagery more readily and had somewhat better perceptual attention, and they reported more unusual sensory experience. In short, they attended to their inner experience more seriously, and that altered how real that experience became for them. I also found that there was a proclivity for experiencing God vividly. Some people are more likely to do so than others because they are temperamentally more able to become absorbed in their inner experience.

Q: After all the time you’ve spent with the people of the Vineyard, what would you say to a skeptic who feels that hearing God’s voice or having a personal relationship with God is completely imaginary?

A: I would say that skeptics should recognize the difficulty and seriousness of the question of whether there is a God, and they should appreciate that those who come to different conclusions struggle with the same questions and puzzles as their own. Belief is neither mindless nor robotic in the churches where I spent time.

Q: Do you think that your book can help bridge the gap between believers and skeptics and help them understand one another?

A: I hope so. My research shows that people who believe in God have smart, sophisticated ideas about belief. They’re not naïve, and they struggle with the contradictions that skeptics see. But they are transformed by faith practice in ways that skeptics do not always understand. I hope that spelling some of this out, as I do in my book, will help people to have more respect for each other.

Q: Did writing this book change or challenge your own beliefs?

A: The hardest question. I would not call myself a Christian, and yet I like going to church. I would not say that I believe in a God out “there,” solid as a mailbox, and yet I would say that I have come to experience God. What this has taught me is how private and precious the experience of God can be for people. Even now, with all my anthropological training, when someone asks me this question, I sometimes cry. Even now, I do not really understand why.